Everyone who has truly tried to authentically live the Catholic faith has experience to some degree what Jeremiah did in today’s first reading. For proclaiming, authentically, God’s Word, Jeremiah experienced mockery, derision, ridicule and criticism. And he did so from the majority of those around him; and especially, (and this is important to note) from those within the Household of God. Yet prophecy he must! To Jeremiah, God’s name, God’s truth and Will, was like a fire raging within his heart and mind; overcome with charitable zeal, that is love for God and love for neighbor, he simply had to speak out, no matter what.

To be a Christian is to be Jeremiah like; we are all by our baptism, called to be prophets. By a prophet, I don’t mean we are called to see or foretell the future, but we are called to show others, by our faithful witness, the way to what is good, true and beautiful. Which ultimately means, that we are called to show others the face of Christ, Who is Goodness, Beauty and Truth Itself. To do this we are to lead them, by our holiness of life, to Christ’s Church, which alone proclaims and shows forth Christ fully and authentically. (As Christians we are called to be so much more than good; we are called to be holy.)

Because of our baptism, St. Paul in today’s second reading, reminds us that we are all members of the royal priesthood of Christ; so we too must, like Christ, be willing, no matter the cost, to offer ourselves as living victims of loving sacrifice to our God. Not that we are to destroy ourselves or be destroyed, but that we are to forsake our selfish will for the Holy Will of God, for His Glory and for the sanctification of souls. Out of love, we are to give our life for God’s truth, which alone gives life. We are to do this both by proclaiming it faithfully to the death if necessary, but also by dying to self and sin, in order to live the truth fully for all to see. Jesus in today’s Gospel, with the authority of God Himself, puts it plainly:

“If a man wishes to come after me, he must deny his very self, take up his cross, and begin to follow in my footsteps. Whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will find it.”

Christ here shows us the only way to authentic happiness and freedom in this world, even though the world will never accept it; the only way is to accept the sweet yoke of Christ, which is His Truth, His Way and His Life. If we try to faithful—holy, we will all have some yoke to carry in our lives, but with Christ our yoke becomes easy and our burden light. And Christ’s yoke can only be carried within His Church, through her teachings and the grace of her Sacraments. Faithfulness to these is exactly what makes our yoke sweet and our burden light.

And so, a true commitment to Christ—living one’s faith in the midst of a misunderstanding even mocking world—is our calling and really is our privilege. There is no higher calling than to be asked to walk in the footsteps of Our Lord Jesus Christ, in whom we place our faith, hope and love. There is no higher calling than to live Christ’s life of self-oblation to the Will of the Father; setting aside our will for the Holy Will of the Father, for His glory and for the salvation of souls.
Far from being a negative, this is the royal way of the cross, the narrow way that leads to authentic happiness, authentic freedom and the fullness of life--life in abundance. When we give our lives totally to God and to His Church, far from losing our life we save it.

True commitment to Christ means then, for us, commitment to His Church, founded, as we heard last week, on Peter the Rock and on the rest of the Apostles and their successors the bishops who are in union with the Holy Father. This Catholic Church is our Savior’s principal and universal sacrament in the world. It is here, and only here, that the fullness of truth and grace are found. It is here, and only here, that we, through the Sacraments, meet, hear, embrace, and are embraced by the living Jesus Christ in the fullness of His humanity and in the fullness of His divinity and so can be saved.

In the ancient Nicene Creed from the 3rd century, which we profess every Sunday, we describe and profess our Church as One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic.”

One, because she is the one and only Church founded personally by Jesus Himself; a living community, better yet, a living family, with one head, one shepherd appointed by Christ, the Bishop of Rome, who not only succeeds Peter but is the Sweet Vicar of Christ on earth;

Holy, not only because she is the perfect and spotless bride of Christ but because she and only she possesses the fount of all holiness--The Blessed Sacrament, the Holy Eucharist; Jesus’ real bodily Presence, as well as the other sacraments which spring forth from the Pierced Heart of the Eucharist, which is the Sacred Heart of Jesus. In the Holy Eucharist we can go to Jesus just as did the Apostles and sit at His feet and adore Him; if we love Him we should want to be with Him in the Holy Eucharist whenever we can.

Catholic, because as we said a couple of weeks ago, she is the universal sacrament of salvation through which our Lord desires to save all men. And so, her mission is universal, she preaches the truth that all men need to attain salvation;

And she is Apostolic because it is the same community of the apostolic era; there is continuity between the early Church depicted in the Acts of the Apostles and our Church today. And so, the truths she teaches come to us from the twelve apostles themselves, through their successors, the Pope and the bishops in union with Him. And by the way where did the apostles get the truth? From the lips of Jesus Himself! And so ultimately, we believe the Church’s teaching because we believe Jesus, who is God among us, God who can neither deceive nor be deceived. And so the voice of the Church and the voice of Christ are one and the same.

Catholicism therefore is unique. There is ancient adage: “Love Christ, love the Church.” St. Cyprian wrote that, “One cannot have God for his father, if he does not have the Church for his mother.” St. Augustine argued, “to the extent that one loves the Church of Christ, one possesses the Holy Spirit.”

To love Christ we must listen to the Church. The Church speaks for Christ. Blessed John Paul II once said, “How could there be any authentic evangelizing, (that is leading souls to Christ and to His truth and so to salvation), if there were no ready and sincere reverence for the Sacred Magisterium, in clear awareness that by submitting to it the People of God are not accepting the word of man but the true Word of God?”

To be a Catholic—to return to Jeremiah—to speak the truth, but especially to live the truth can be especially difficult today. Sometimes we feel like saying, “You duped me, O LORD, and I let myself be duped; you were too strong for me, and you triumphed. All the day I am an object of laughter; everyone mocks me.” We can even say to ourselves, “I will not mention him, I will speak in his name no more.” But then if we love Jesus, by loving His Church, if we turn to Him more by converting more fully through our submission and obedience to His Church, accepting and living her teachings with the help of the grace of the Sacraments, then, then, we will say, “But then it becomes like fire burning in my heart, imprisoned in my bones; I grow weary holding it in, I cannot endure it, I must, must speak it and live it even if men in the world don’t want to hear it; because even if they don’t know it, they need it.” Let us not be duped by men, even some priests, who tell us what we want to hear but not what we need to hear; let us instead turn to the voice of our Lord which becomes audible and infallible to us in the teachings of our Beautiful Catholic Faith; the faith of the apostles and the faith of all the saints.

Let us pray: Jesus in our world today there are many false prophets who are proclaiming a message that sounds good to our ears but is detrimental and even deadly to our souls. Help us with your grace to hear your message, your truth, the fullness of which comes to us through the Catholic Church you founded. Help us to be open to the truth so that we may accept it with our intellect and embrace it with our wills, and so live according to the Will of the Father in order to inherit life and share that life with others. Jesus we want to be truly committed to you; only by our acceptance of your truth will we find a solution to problems of our present age; The answer does not lie in political and economic reform; for what does it profit us to gain the whole world and lose ourselves?” I know that to abandon the Church and her teachings is to abandon home, family and life, for it is really to abandon you. Help me to forsake all else in order to possess and be possessed by you and your love, that is all I need.

Our Lady, Mother of Christ, Mother of the Truth and Mother of the Church, help us at his Holy Mass and at all the Masses we attend, to offer ourselves, our sufferings, our very lives “as a holy sacrifice truly pleasing to God.” Spiritually as priests/victims, by your hands dear mother, we place our offering on the altar and thru the mediation of the ministerial priest who is acting in the very person of Christ, we unite our offering to Christ’s own sacrifice. Help us to more fully offer ourselves to God and allow ourselves through Holy Communion, to be conformed, not to this passing world, but conformed to the Love of God and to His Holy Will, to be conformed to Christ, giving ourselves as victims of Love, becoming Co-Redeemers with Jesus for the salvation of souls and of the whole world. Amen.

It interesting that just last week I was listening to a Christian Radio station and this very passage from today’s Gospel was the point of discussion. The commentator, who wasn’t Catholic, was fielding a question about what this passage meant with regard to the Catholic Church’s claim about the Papacy. The Catholic Church of course uses this passage to support its claim that the “rock” that Jesus is referring to is the very person of Peter, the first pope, as well as to Peter’s successors, the popes throughout the ages; that Jesus intended to build His Church on Peter and give the popes as the successors of Peter the power to bind and to loose sin in the sacrament of confession; as well, as to teach the truth in the name and with the authority of Jesus and to do so with the charism of infallibility, that is to teach the truth that Jesus came to save and set men free without error for all men and woman to hear. All of this is included in the promise of Jesus that the Church founded on the Rock of Peter would never fall, for the gates of hell would not prevail against it.

The radio commentator said wrongly, that in no way was Jesus referring to the rock as Peter, but instead Jesus was referring to Himself as the Rock. The commentator said in the original Greek language in which Matthew was written this is clear. I don’t have the time to break down the commentator’s argument, but the main problem with it is that Jesus didn’t speak Greek, he spoke Aramaic. In Aramaic Jesus is literally saying, Peter thou art rock and on you Peter, a name which literally means rock, I will build my Church. In other words Jesus is saying, “Thou art Rock and on you Rock I will build my Church.” And so it is clear, that on the profession of Peter in which He was the first to publicly proclaim Jesus as the Son of God on earth, God Himself in the flesh, it is on this profession on the Rock that is Peter” that Jesus builds His One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church.

Yes, it is true as the commentator said, that Jesus is the ultimate Rock of our faith, the rock on which we must build our house, that is our lives, in order that the storms of this life will not tear us down. But Jesus has given us a visible representative of Himself, His Vicar, in the person of Peter, the first Pope and His successors. If we are to be sure that our lives are built on Christ, then our lives have to be built on the Rock of Peter, the Head of the true Church of Christ. As the saints have said throughout the ages, “Where Peter is there is the Church, there is God…there is eternal life!”

In light of this reality, today Jesus too asks each one of us personally, “who do you say that I am?” To answer this question correctly we must say with Peter, with the Pope, that “Jesus you are indeed the Son of the living God, God himself!” And so we can only answer this question fully in and with the One Church that Jesus founded on the person of Peter. It is in this Church and through her teachings that we receive, without error and unadulterated, the truth which we absolutely need for our salvation. It is in this Church and through Her Sacraments that we receive the Grace to live out this truth in our lives with faith, hope and charity, for it is in this Church that we encounter the living resurrected Jesus, the very person of Jesus in His Body, Blood, Soul and Divinity in the Holy Eucharist, in order to believe, adore, hope and love Him as the living God, offering ourselves to Him in love and receiving Him worthily through the confession and remission of our sins in order to become one with Him in the unity of love and through Him one with the Father and Holy Spirit.

When Peter made his proclamation of faith in Jesus as the Son of the living God, Peter’s life began to be radically transformed. He began to move from seeing the world as revolving around himself, to seeing the world and his life as revolving around Jesus and His Church and Her teachings. With us, Jesus wants to work this same type of radical transformation in our hearts and lives. However, our faith must take more and more a hold of our hearts and allow us to be stretched beyond whatever we could have imagined.

We too must be of the same attitude of Peter, one of total surrender to our Lord and to His truth, to His Church, allowing Him permission to change our hearts, our minds and our lives more in conformity to His truth. The teachings of the Church come to us through the authority of Peter and His successors; it is an authority that comes from Christ himself. Our eternal salvation is dependent on our acceptance of this authority and the truth that it proclaims and whether or not we struggled to live this truth with every fiber of our being assisted by the grace of prayer and the Sacraments.

The truth can be hard but not as hard as living a lie…lies lead to slavery and death but the truth to freedom and life. Only by our full acceptance of the truth of Jesus Christ which comes to us in the teachings of the Church through the God given authority of the popes and the bishops in union with the pope do we fully profess to Jesus in the Holy Eucharist; “You are the Christ the Son of the Living God.” To reject the truth, to reject the teachings of the Church, is to reject Jesus who is the Truth; to embrace the truth is to embrace Jesus Christ and eternal life with Him forever.

Let us pray: Holy Mary, Mother of the Church, Mother of the Eucharist, pray for us, lead us to Jesus, help us to surrender to Him fully in faith, hope and love and to share His Truth, His light, His Love, to share Him with the entire world. He is our Rock; help us to build our firm foundation on Him and on His visible representative on earth, the Holy Father the Pope. Help us to answer His question of “who do you say I am?” by responding, “Jesus you are the Eucharist and the Eucharist is You…You are God and so the Eucharist is God and God is the Eucharist!" Amen.

This Gospel marks the only time that we know of that Jesus ever ventured outside of the Jewish territory. Perhaps, He may have needed time away from the leaders of the house of Israel who not only refused to see Him as the long awaited Messiah and deliverer of God’s chosen people but, who also refused to believe that He was the Son of God who became man-God Himself. Jesus earlier had sad that He had come to give His message only to the House of Israel, but by this venture into Gentile territory, he was pointing to his later commissioning of the disciples to preach the Gospel not only to the Jews, but also to the entire world.

So here is this pagan woman, a woman who is not only a gentile but also a Canaanite. Remember the Canaanites were ancient enemies of the Jews. Here Jesus encounters a gentile woman who gives us an example of humble, faithful and loving prayer before Lord. This woman knows that Jesus is a Jew and that she is gentile and even more an enemy of the Jews. Yet she has heard the wonders, the miracles of Jesus and she has a child who is in greet need; and mothers stop at nothing to help their children.

She is a mother in anguish because good mothers always suffer along with their children. She doesn’t care about herself; she only knows that this man may be able to help her child. She doesn’t care what others may say or even if she makes a fool out of herself. She throws herself at his feet like a beggar and begins to pray without ceasing for this Jewish man to help her child. She knows that He alone can help her, save her child, save Her.

The disciples themselves are ashamed at the way she is acting; they don’t want to be in this pagan territory in the first place, a territory full of sinners and enemies. But Jesus wishes to teach them compassion (not pity, but a willingness to suffer with) and so teach them true love of neighbor. Jesus wants them to intercede on her behalf by asking Him to help her, their “so called enemy.” But instead, they ask Him to send her away. However, even after their attempt to rid themselves of her, she for her part only persists more. Jesus is moved with pity for her and he says, “It is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the house-dogs.”

Now at first, this may sound like a cruel derogatory remark. But the opposite is the case, because Jesus is looking at the woman with eyes of compassion and with a warm smile on his face, which robbed the words of any insulting tone. The word dog that he uses here is not the word that religious leaders of the day used when they called the gentiles and Canaanites “dogs.” No, the word here is more like puppy.

In other words, Jesus is showing this sorrowful mother, that He doesn’t share in the hatred & lack of compassion (and really lack of justice, for Love of neighbor, is primarily a commitment to justice, and is the touchstone for faith and love of God.) of the religious leaders of the day. But even more, He is showing that not only He is the messiah, but that He is her Lord and God. He wants her to know that he has heard her humble, persistent plea and is ready to answer her faithful, childlike prayer. And she in return is filled with faith and understanding and responds to His love by calling Jesus, Lord, and saying with a trusting, childlike smile, “Even the puppies eat of the pieces which fall from their master’s table.”

This woman of great faith teaches us about the loving characteristics of prayer. She teaches us how we are to pray, what kind of disposition of the heart we must have when we pray. She teaches us that we, like her, must realize our unworthiness to approach Jesus with our prayer, that we must be humble before our Lord and become beggars, crying out, “Jesus Son of David have mercy on me, a great sinner who is unworthy to approach your table”. This is the beginning of prayer-humility--Humility that affects our actions, our demeanor, even our way of dress, especially at Holy Mass.

Humble Prayer starts with an act of adoration. Just like the woman, we realize the importance of prayer and we fall on our knees. We humble ourselves, physically and spiritually, body and soul, and make an act of faith & hope by showing God that we realize who He is and how much we need him, how we are completely dependent on God for everything, even to our very existence. We also recognize that we can’t even pray without the Help of His Spirit. And so, we call out to Him, “My God Creator of my soul, Father of my soul, I adore Thee and I Love Thee, Help me to adore Thee and Love Thee more.”

In our humble prayer, in acknowledgment of our poverty, we come face to face with the gentleness and compassion of Jesus Christ who smiles at us, like he did with the woman, and He lets us know that He Loves Us. He teaches us how to pray, trusting and knowing that we have a God who already knows what we need. Jesus teaches us, like the Samaritan woman, to always be persistent in our prayer and to have trust that He hear us and wants to answer our prayer, but that His answer must be given in His time and according to His Will. And we respond, “Lord, how could we possibly want anything but Your Holy Will, since you alone know what we really need, we beg you, give us only those things that will bring us closer to You.”

Jesus also teaches us, what his disciples in the Gospel missed. He wants us to know that we must pray with each other and for each other. Jesus is most pleased when we pray for others, especially before Him in the Holy Eucharist, which is the Sacrament of His love because It is He! This is the prayer that is the most fruitful. We should pray for those in our families, our friends and those who the Lord has brought into our life. However, we can’t stop there---WE should also, especially pray for our enemies. “What good is it, if you love only those you love you, even the pagans do as much?”

When we pray for others, as well as our self, prayer becomes part of our daily life by offering up our work and activity of the day, even our sufferings, as a prayer; we become willing to show true compassion which again means not pity but a willingness to suffer with and along side. We also, come to recognize the importance of prayer in community, prayer together as a parish family, praying for each other and for others outside our parish family. With this recognition we also see the extreme failure in charity and grave sinfulness of deliberately missing Holy Mass on Sundays, or arriving late or leaving early without a serious reason and not participating lovingly, fully and actively, with full heart, mind, soul and body and with all of our strength and will.

The Holy Mass is in fact the most perfect of all prayers. Without the Holy Mass no prayer would be worthy to come before God. The Holy Mass is the Most perfect of all prayers because it is the sacrificial prayer of Jesus to the Father on our behalf, the prayer of His self-offering to the Father for our salvation-it is the ultimate act of compassion.

Because Jesus is God, the Holy Mass is the prayer of God to God on behalf of poor little puppies’ like you and me. It is the Holy Mass that allows our prayer to ascend to the Father because the Mass makes it possible for you and me to come before Jesus, before His table, better yet His Sacred Altar. If we offer ourselves to Him, our whole heart, with trust, and receive him in faith, he perfects our love, our love for God and our love for neighbor for love of God…He makes our love sacrificial not emotional! At Holy Mass, in fact Jesus gives us His own Heart to love with….The Body of Christ.

I implore you to take a look at you prayer life. None of us can say that we pray enough, including me. Do you pray more than just when you are at Sunday Mass? Do you pray the Mass? Do you only pray when you need or want something? Do you pray for others, especially your enemies? Do you begin each prayer, like this woman of today’s Gospel, with a humble, childlike trust in God, pleading Him to answer your prayers according to His Will? Because that is what prayer really is, prayer is not begging God to change His Mind and Will to ours, but our prayer helps us to change our minds and our hearts to correspond to His Holy Will in love so we can become united to Him in Love. “

Prayer as a way of “accustoming” oneself to being with God brings into being men and women who are not motivated by selfishness, by the desire to possess or by the thirst for power, but by gratuitousness, by the desire to love, by the thirst to serve, in other words who are motivated by God; and only in this way is it possible to bring light to the darkness of the world” (Pope Emeritus Benedict. General Audience Paul VI Hall, Vatican City 20 June 2012).

So let us all ask the Blessed Mother of God to teach us how to pray, so that we may conform ourselves more and more to the Will of God. “From Mary we learn graciousness and readiness to help, but we also learn humility and generosity in accepting God's will” (Pope Emeritus Benedict). In her school of prayer we will learn to pray for others in need, learn to serve them by helping them to find the healing that they so desperately are looking for-to find Christ Himself!

Through her intercession, let us too, ask the Holy Spirit to grant us the grace to realize ever more deeply, that far from receiving scraps from the table at this Holy Mass, we instead receive at the Altar of the Lord, the Lord Himself, His Body, Blood, Soul and Divinity. Let us become “puppies” before the Lord and humbly throw ourselves at His feet, and beg Him to bring us closer to Him through Holy Communion, even to a mystical union of perfect love and happiness with the living God. Then we can show true compassion to those we meet, even our enemies, becoming instruments of God’s mercy and love, leading those separated from God and His Love, to this same union of love with the Living God.

“O Jesus Son of David have mercy on me, a great sinner who is unworthy to approach your table. Let it be done unto me according to Thy Word! Amen.

Saturday, August 9, 2014

Today’s Gospel reading is one of my favorites. I am sure most of us have seen paintings depicting this scene of Peter meeting Jesus out on the water. Peter is sinking as he is desperately grabbing for Jesus’ hand. Jesus, for His part because He is God, is very much in control as He calmly reaches out his hand to Peter rebuking him for his lack of faith, “O man of little faith why did you doubt?”

It is easy for us to be hard on Peter and want to “rebuke” him as well for his lack of faith. The interesting thing about this story that we must remember, however, is that-- Peter got out of the boat. How many of us would do the same? Peter walked on water. How many of us have enough faith and trust in Jesus to be able to do that?

But where did Peter then go wrong; why did he begin to sink? The answer is simply that Peter took His eyes off Jesus. Then Peter saw the strength of the wind, He stopped walking toward Jesus; He became frightened, he no longer saw that Jesus was with Him even in the darkness of the storm. It was then that he began to loose hope and sink in the sea of despair.

The lesson for us today is obvious. When we look at the storms waging in our world, when we see only the waves and the struggles in our lives; it is then that we must struggle to keep our eyes focus on the face of Jesus. Another name for looking at the face of Jesus is call adoration. Adoration is to look at the face of Jesus and see the loving and merciful face of God Himself. Adoration moves us to offer ourselves completely and to abandon ourselves completely to God, without fear and with total trust

In our spiritual life and in our everyday life (the two should never be separate) we can indeed follow Jesus anywhere, fully, if we just keep our eyes on Him. To often however, we take note of the wind and the waves, we see the dangers, the difficulties, and the sufferings and so we fail to keep looking at Jesus. In our relationship with Him, we then begin to count the cost of following Him totally, fully and absolutely in love, and so we take our eyes off of Him and begin to sink in to despair, despondency and even, God forbid, loss of faith and love.

Yet even so, if we just call out to him and return our gaze to Him, reach out to him through our adoration of Him, then He will grab us, like He did with Peter, by the hand and save us from sinking; He will increase our faith, hope and love. And then with Jesus, and with our eyes daily focused on Him, we can do anything He asks us to do. United to Him we can even do the miraculous, that is we can leave all behind in order to follow Christ and His Church and become great saints.

But we must keep our eyes on Jesus, not as some ideal, but as a Divine Person who is truly present in His Church. And so we can only keep our eyes on Jesus if we adore His very Person in the Holy Eucharist both at Holy Mass and outside of Mass.

We look at the Eucharist with faith, we “see” the face of God and adore Him truly present there. The more we adore Him there in faith, the more we can handle the great winds and waves of this present world and of the spiritual life; the more we trust Him the more we can overcome the storms, that is the temptations, passions, and persecutions of our age. And the more we love Him in the Holy Eucharist, the more closely we can be with Him always, united to Him in love, until He finally leads us to the safe harbor of eternity.

In the Holy Eucharist we have to remember Jesus, our Lord and our God, doesn’t manifest Himself to us in great and stupendous marvels, or speak to us in a thunderous voice, but He comes to us hidden in the smallness of a little white host, and He speaks to us in the silence of our hearts with the tiny whisper of His Divine Love. Yet, united to Jesus in the Holy Eucharist, with our eyes focused on Him in adoration, trusting in Him completely, listening to Him speak through His Church and accepting her teachings as His own, and living them with the help of the grace of prayer and the Sacraments, we will never sink for He will unite us to Himself now and forever.

It is the blessed Mother who will help us, if we turn to her, to keep our eyes always focused on Jesus through adoration of the Holy Eucharist, which is Jesus, God in the flesh. And as a result of our adoration of her divine Son in the Holy Eucharist, she will also help us to keep our eyes on Him during the ordinary events of our every day lives and to never lose hope even when the darkness of the storm may come. She will help us draw closer to the Sacred Heart of her Son in the Holy Eucharist and become one with Him in love.